Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (6 page)

On 14 August, he was arrested. In the following months new legislation was passed to deal with members of the Vichy government. Giraud, who had signed Pucheu’s
laissez-passer,
found himself attacked from two directions. The right-wing colonists, who had supported Vichy, asked what the value of Giraud’s signature on a safe-conduct was if it did not save you; while the Communists called for Giraud’s head for having been Pucheu’s protector.

Pucheu had a further value for de Gaulle: his condemnation would also serve as the condemnation of the Vichy government. In March 1944, Pucheu was put on trial for his life and the Marshal’s reputation. Proving a regime’s criminality, as this trial sought to do, did not necessarily prove its illegality, but it was a useful act of psychological warfare. In Paris, Simone de Beauvoir overheard two collaborators in a café talking of the trial. ‘It’s our trial,’ said one. His companion agreed. It brought home to many others, notably the writer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, that the side they had backed was now liable to lose.

Pucheu, the first collaborator to face the official justice of the victors, died in defiance. He insisted on giving the orders to the firing squad himself. But documents discovered after the Liberation proved without doubt that, as the Communists suspected, he had been guilty of picking out hostages to be executed by the Germans.

Operation Torch, coming after Alamein and followed by Stalingrad, gave a tremendous encouragement to the early Resistance groups, both ‘
les gens de Londres
’ and ‘
les gens de l’intérieur
’, who endured the whole Occupation. But during 1943, severe setbacks soon followed inside France, where the fight between the Gestapo and the Milice on one side and the Resistance on the other became increasingly violent.

Jean Moulin, having achieved his aim of unifying the Resistance in May, sensed that the Gestapo was closing in. He had already warned the BCRA in London that somebody should be ready to replace him. In answer to his request for a deputy, General de Gaulle’s military assistant, Claude Bouchinet-Serreulles, volunteered and parachuted in. Serreulles made contact with Moulin in Lyons on 19 June. But two days later, Moulin was trapped by the Germans in the hillside suburb of Caliure. He died after severe torture supervised by Klaus Barbie.

Serreulles, although finding himself in an almost impossible position, quickly re-established contact with the leaders of the different movements making up the Secret Army.

De Gaulle’s most pressing concern was not the Resistance but his relationship with the two Anglo-Saxon leaders. Roosevelt, still advised by Admiral Leahy, his former ambassador to Vichy, that Pétain was the only man to unite the country, went ahead with preparations for the administration of French territory as if neither de Gaulle’s government-in-waiting nor the Resistance existed. Already officials were being trained in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the acronym which Gaullists feared and loathed most: AMGOT – Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories.

De Gaulle, in spite of his anger, did not lose his ability to calculate the odds. He threatened to withdraw all cooperation if AMGOT was imposed on liberated France. Americans in the European theatre, including Eisenhower, knew that any attempt to introduce military government against the mass of the people would be disastrous.

Three days before D-Day, on 3 June 1944, the French National Liberation Committee in Algiers proclaimed itself to be the provisional government of the French Republic. De Gaulle and his staff then flew to England, arriving the next morning to hear that the Allies had entered Rome and that the invasion of France was imminent.

Churchill, although determined to be magnanimous towards de Gaulle, was in a state of subdued frenzy waiting for the invasion. With a disastrous lack of tact, he told de Gaulle that he had sent for him to broadcast to France. Even the more diplomatic Eisenhower, under renewed pressure from Roosevelt, reverted to the American position that de Gaulle and his colleagues counted for nothing until elections were held. On the morning of the invasion, Churchill heard that de Gaulle had refused to broadcast to the French people or to provide liaison officers to accompany the Allied forces. All his resentment and frustration burst forth. He accused de Gaulle of treason to the cause and raged about sending him back to Algiers in chains. American and British officials were horrified that the volatile chemistry between national leaders should have exploded at such a moment. ‘It’s pandemonium,’ a senior French diplomat noted in his diary. Finally Eden calmed Churchill, while Viennot, de Gaulle’s ambassador, and Duff Cooper persuaded de Gaulle to send liaison officers.

On 14 June 1944 de Gaulle crossed the Channel in the French destroyer
Combattante
. His party included Gaston Palewski, the ambassador Pierre Viennot, and Generals Koenig and Béthouart. One of them, hoping to lighten their leader’s mood, said to him: ‘Has it occurred to you, General, that four years ago to the day the Germans marched into Paris?’

‘Well! They made a mistake!’ came the inimitable reply.

De Gaulle relaxed only after the party had landed on a beach near Courseulles in Normandy and visited General Montgomery in his caravan. He then went on to meet civilians on French soil for the first time since 1940. These rather dazed citizens all knew his voice from the nocturnal radio broadcasts, but nobody recognized his face: Vichy had never allowed the publication of his photograph. News spread rapidly. The local
curé,
Father Paris, came cantering up on his horse to reprove the General for not having shaken his hand. De Gaulle climbed out of the jeep he was in. ‘
Monsieur le curé,
’ he said, opening his arms, ‘I do not shake your hand, I embrace you.’ Two gendarmes then appeared on bicycles, which wobbled as they tried to salute. They were sent on ahead to Bayeux, heralds of the General’s coming.

Here the emotional reaction to de Gaulle’s appearance was muted by the usual Norman reserve. One old woman, however, became confused in the enthusiasm of the moment, and cried out, ‘
Vive le Maréchal!
’De Gaulle, on hearing this discordant note, is said to have murmured, ‘Another person who does not read the newspapers.’ Gaston Palewski, when told of the approach of the Bishop of Bayeux and Lisieux ‘to greet the Liberator’, was certain they had finally won: ‘the clergy does not take risks’.

The sub-prefect appointed by Vichy, wearing his red, white and blue sash of office, welcomed de Gaulle’s party. But the change of regime had been too abrupt for him. He suddenly remembered the portrait of Marshal Pétain in the
salle d’honneur
and dashed off to take it down. It was four years and three days since the General and the Marshal had met on the steps of the Château du Muguet.

On 31 July, General Patton’s Third Army began the breakout from Normandy at Avranches. Encircling the Germans from the west, his right hook brought the Allies to Argentan, 167 kilometres from Paris.

For General de Gaulle, there was only one formation which merited the honour of liberating the capital of France. This was the Deuxième Division Blindée, the French 2nd Armoured Division, always known as the ‘2e DB’. Its commander was General Leclerc, the
nom de guerre
of Philippe de Hauteclocque.

Much larger than most divisions, the 2e DB was 16,000 strong, equipped with American uniforms, weapons, half-tracks and Sherman tanks. Its core consisted of men who had followed Leclerc from Chad across the Sahara, besieged the Italian garrison at Koufra and gone on to join the British. In its ranks served regulars from the metropolitan army, including cavalrymen from Saumur, Spahis (colonial troops), sailors without ships, North African Arabs, Senegalese and French colonials who had never before stood on the soil of France. One company, the 9th, was known as ‘
la nueve
’ because it was full of Spanish Republicans, veterans of even harder battles. Appropriately, the battalion itself was commanded by Major Putz, the most respected of all the battalion commanders in the International Brigades. Leclerc’s division was such an extraordinary mixture, with Gaullists, Communists, monarchists, socialists, Giraudists and anarchists working closely together, that General de Gaulle formed an over-optimistic vision of how post-war France could unite under his leadership.

De Gaulle had flown to Algiers after the Normandy landings. He regained France on 20 August, to be met with deeply unsettling news. A rising, largely inspired by the Communists, had begun in Paris. The Allied armies were in no position to come to its support. For de Gaulle, an insurrection was symbolically vital to demonstrate that the liberation of France was not purely an American operation. But at the same time he knew that for the Communists it was a deliberate part of their strategy, creating the opportunity to seize power before his own representatives could assert themselves.

On 15 August, the decision of the German authorities to disarm part of the Paris police force provoked a strike. News of the landings on the Mediterranean coast round Saint-Tropez was announced on the radio at noon and strengthened resolve. The Communists, who wanted to increase the pressure towards an uprising, had begun to infiltrate and recruit among the police as rapidly as possible. Since many policemen were embarrassed at their record of subservience to German orders, a Communist Party card offered a good insurance policy. The same day, a call for ‘
l’insurrection populaire
’ appeared in
L’Humanité,
the party newspaper.

Two days later the National Council of the Resistance and the COMAC (Comité Militaire d’Action) debated the call to arms. Although presided over by Georges Bidault, a Christian Democrat, the National Council of the Resistance was dominated by the Communists, as was the military committee. The twenty-nine-year-old Gaullist Resistance chief, General Jacques Chaban-Delmas, had returned from London the day before, having accomplished the last part of the journey through the German lines on a bicycle. The purpose of his clandestine journey had been to warn the Allies that a premature insurrection in Paris was inevitable. Yet he returned with the vain instruction from General Koenig, de Gaulle’s chief of staff, that there was to be no uprising without his order. Koenig had been appointed commander of all the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), known both affectionately and disparagingly as ‘
les fifis
’, but so far his authority was purely theoretical.

Chaban-Delmas had told the military authorities in London that against the 16,000-strong German garrison, which might be reinforced by another division, the Resistance in Paris had fewer than 15,000 FFI volunteers and only enough weapons for 2,000. Even that seems an optimistic figure. The best the Resistance in Paris could hope for were some army rifles hidden since 1940, shotguns and revolvers often stolen from arms shops, a few sub-machine-guns parachuted elsewhere in France by the Allies and weapons taken from the Germans by force. A Communist youth group in the 18th
arrondissement,
for example, used to send their female comrades to pick up German soldiers round Pigalle, then entice them into an alley, where young male comrades were waiting to club them down and take their weapons.

A group of Communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) also managed to seize a ton of explosive from the Poudrerie Sevran. But very few of the volunteers had much experience either of the army or of the Resistance. Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, the Communist who commanded the FFI of Greater Paris, admitted to Louis Teuléry, a major in the Service B (the Communist counter-intelligence service) that the Communist FTP had numbered only 600 men in the whole of the Greater Paris area before the Normandy landings. The real rush to join came afterwards.

Thirty-five young resistants fell headlong into a trap when they were promised a consignment of weapons by an
agent provocateur
working for the Gestapo. When they arrived at the rendezvous they were rounded up, brutally interrogated at Gestapo headquarters in the rue des Saussaies, and executed.

Yet Colonel Rol-Tanguy was unimpressed by calls for caution. That day the FTP gave the order to seize vehicles and prepare them with armour-plating, as if Paris in 1944 was comparable to Madrid or Barcelona in July 1936. The following day, flyposters across the city called for a general strike and ‘
l’insurrection libératrice
’.

On 17 August, Charles Luizet, de Gaulle’s appointee as Prefect of Police, arrived in secret. He became part of the skeleton team of administrators, of whom Alexandre Parodi, de Gaulle’s delegate general, was the most senior.

That day also saw the exodus of Germans and collaborators in increasing numbers – what the inimitable diarist Jean Galtier-Boissière described as ‘
la grande fuite des Fritz
’. The immensely tall Galtier-Boissière, with his military moustache from the First World War, straw hat in the style of a Victorian traveller and ivory-handled umbrella, was a curious figure, full of contradictions. A funny and endearing anarchist of the
grande bourgeoisie,
he had started his satirical publication
Le Crapouillot
(the slang for a trench-mortar) as a corporal in the front line. Now he noted the traffic jams of departing vehicles directed by German
Feldgendarmerie
with their discs on sticks: ‘Along the rue Lafayette, coming from the luxury hotels around the Étoile, sparkling torpedoes pass by containing purple-faced generals, accompanied by elegant blonde women, who look as if they are off to some fashionable resort.’

Overruling the objections of Pierre Laval, the German ambassador, Otto Abetz, ordered the evacuation of the Vichy administration to Belfort, a few miles from the German border. Laval’s attempts over the last few days to convene parliamentarians, such as Édouard Herriot, the President of the National Assembly, had only managed to enrage General Oberg, the chief of the SS in France.